Swab Ephemeral 2019

STIMULUS​

Curated by Caterina Almirall

Under the title STIMULUS, Ephemeral 2019 presents a selection of installation works that enhance the interaction of the public with the pieces. Curated by Caterina Almirall and with the collaboration of the Creation Factories of Barcelona: Hangar, La Escocesa and Fabra i Coats.

STIMULUS is something that encourages action or effort, that provokes or accelerates action, feeling, thought, etc. In biology, it refers to something that excites functional activity in an organism and causes the body to react. STIMULUS deals precisely with the analysis of the forms of perception and communication with the environment. The artists work in the construction of languages ​​and forms of communication and develop communicative and interpretative strategies through the materials they manipulate (rocks, metal, branches, light, sound, color, language or the body itself), to try to understand our relationship with the world through the senses. The senses are the primordial channel of communication at all levels, between humans, non-humans and the environment; and it is in them that contemporary artistic and conceptual production is essentially based: to understand that the senses do not generate truth but systems of relationship. Stimulating them, as well as observing them, manipulating them or inventing new ones allows us to become aware of them and how they operate in us.

Lluc Baños Aixalà - Rosetta, 2019

Language shapes the world, represents it, constitutes it in a known way. Each language will therefore give a different form conditioned by the choice of the signs with which we decide to name it and point it out. The work of Lluc Baños tells us precisely some of the systems through which we relate to the world through the ways in which we represent it, measure or name it.

For this occasion he presents a series of modular sculptures that are signs for a language, like an alphabet, with which the artist plays to create an order, a meaning, in short, a form. The sculptures approach the graphic language, so they invite us to think about perceptive schemes, signs, letters, coding systems. As if they wanted to reduce to the minimum lines, complex volumes that make up reality. Appropriating a language that seems scientific and that searches in the schematization, the demonstration that the filter exercised by the systematization in the construction of systems for the understanding of the world, finally, generate reality.

Microglia, from the series Ain't no real spell if made out of words, 2019.
Iron.
125 x 115 x 20 cm.

Guillermo Moreno Mirallas - Soundscapes, 2018.

Starting from the stone as a basic, minimum element, as a primordial object, Guillermo Moreno explores our relationship with the world in a multidisciplinary work in which sound and mineral are mixed. Using sound as a material loaded with digital information, Soundscapes proposes us to approach the world to realize the interaction and the effects that occur in this relationship.

Soundcapes is an interactive piece in which people are invited to come and interact with it. From applying contact microphones to the rocks, the sound is manipulated through a pedal effect generating different sound densities. The result is the poetics that suggest a language and a form of communication between us and the world - the mineral world in this case - that does not pretend to generate a form of understanding, but a space of relationship that goes much further, and that it allows us to open the possibilities of imagining communication formats. In other words, the matter is transformed into sound so that the stones speak to us.

Extract of video documentaton of the interaction with the piece.
Avaliable in the artist's web.

Jessica Moroni - Amalgamas, 2019

Amalgamas starts with evoking the relationship that links human life with natural processes. It refers to a constructive procedure inspired by the accumulations of organic objects in nature. From the observation of these elements, Jessica Moroni generates a process of creation that allows her to gather objects from different origins, using an heterogeneous materiality that connects parts of trees, trunks, roots, branches, with a cellulose mortar, the papier mache, and the plaster.

To coexist with nature is to understand that we are linked to continuous processes of transformation and movement. The mutation inherent in natural phenomena is the basis of Jessica Moroni's interest in the processes of transformation and the passage of time. Her artistic practice deals with the corporeality of materials, uses organic materials and ephemeral elements subject to external factors and observes the effects of time through the metamorphosis of the materials that make up his sculptures. Her process of creation begins in the forests, where she finds and selects the natural elements on which it intervenes in a second moment. Walking, observing, collecting, are necessary actions for the production of her sculptural pieces.

The work of Anna Irina Russell is an investigation on the codes and the forms of communication and interaction with which to try to decipher some established social constructions. It tries to break the relationships between the body, the space and the object from the bewildering and unusual, looking for error, noise and distortion as strategies that indicate the ways in which we understand "reality". With Estrategias para... starts from rehearsing forms of communication that operate independently of the predominant ones, such as a series of communicative exercises with signals of reflected solar light, in which it she seeks to establish long-distance solar communications. The final installation includes the elements that allow this communication but that at the same time distort the message, adopting different meanings on each occasion. They are partially visible signals, depending on the position of the emitter/s and receiver/s in space. In the same way that the shape and position of the reflective material, they deform the light signal that it emits.

Pieces of metalon and methacrylate.
Variable dimensions.
Presented at the CC Fort Pienc, during the exhibition of the Jiser creation grant with Hangar: BCN>TNS>ALG, 2019.

Aldo Urbano - Umbral, 2017.

Sensing that the color is not there, but is created by our mind as a compensation to create reality, Aldo Urbano proposes to understand the colors as a hallucination. His works respond to the will to generate stimuli that incite these compensations and hallucinations. His work starts from painting, exploring issues related to the perception of color, and extends towards the relationship with space and the creation of parallel realities. It is recurrent in his work to bring painting to spatiality by offering a sensory journey between reality and other places in the mind such as dreams or perceptual deception. For this reason, sometimes Aldo Urbano's paintings are transformed into installations that invite us to think about color in relation to space and our experience of it. In this proposal he develops an exploration of both bi and three-dimensional color in relation to form and space, proposing to cross different perceptual universes and literally enter them.